Killers of the Flower Moon

by David Grann

  Before the retrial of Hale and Ramsey for the murder of Roan began, in late October, a Justice Department official advised St. Lewis, the prosecutor, that “this whole defense is a tissue of lies, and it is up to us to get at the facts.” He added, “There will be no one to blame except ourselves if they succeed in fixing this jury.” White’s men were assigned to safeguard the jury.

  The prosecution presented essentially the same case, though in more streamlined form. To the surprise of the courtroom, Mollie was briefly summoned to the stand by Hale’s attorney Freeling.

  “Will you state your name?” he asked her.

  “Mollie Burkhart.”

  “Are you the present wife of Ernest Burkhart?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He then exposed the secret that she’d long kept from Ernest, asking, Was Henry Roan your husband at one time?

  “Yes, sir,” she said.

  The prosecution protested that the question was immaterial, and the judge agreed. Indeed, there seemed to be no point to the line of questioning other than to inflict more suffering upon her. After she identified a photograph of Roan, she stepped down from the stand and returned to the gallery.

  When Ernest Burkhart was on the stand, the prosecutor Leahy questioned him about his marriage to Mollie. “Your wife is an Osage Indian?” Leahy asked him.

  “She is,” Ernest replied.

  At an earlier proceeding, he was asked what his profession was, and he said, “I don’t work. I married an Osage.”

  One of Hale’s lawyers now asked Ernest if he’d pleaded guilty to murdering his wife’s sister by blowing up her house while she was inside.

  “That is right,” he said.

  Hoping to place the blame for the killings on Ernest, Hale’s lawyer recited the names of Mollie’s murdered family members, one after the other. “Has your wife now any surviving relatives outside of the two children she has by you?”

  “She has not.”

  There was a hush in the courtroom as Mollie looked on; her gaze could no longer be avoided. After only eight days of testimony, both parties rested. One of the prosecutors said in his closing statement, “The time now has come for you men to stand for law and order and decency, time to uncrown this King. You should say by your verdict as courageous men, decent men, that they shall hang by the neck until they are dead.” The judge advised the jury members that they must set aside sympathies or prejudices for either side. He warned, “There never has been a country on this earth that has fallen except when that point was reached…where the citizens would say, ‘We cannot get justice in our courts.’ ” On the evening of October 28, the jury began deliberating. By the next morning, word spread that the jurors had reached a decision, and the courtroom filled with the familiar participants.

  The judge asked the foreman if indeed the jury had reached a verdict. “Yes, sir,” he replied, and handed him a sheet of paper. The judge looked at it for a moment, then passed it on to the clerk. The courtroom was so quiet that the ticking of a clock on the wall could be heard. A reporter later observed, “Hale’s face expressed a guarded eagerness; Ramsey’s was a mask.” Standing in front of the still room, the clerk read out that the jury found John Ramsey and William K. Hale guilty of first-degree murder.

  Hale and Ramsey appeared shocked. The judge said to them, “A jury has found you guilty of the murder of an Osage Indian, Mr. Hale and Mr. Ramsey, and it becomes my duty to pass sentence. Under the law the jury may find you guilty and that carries the death penalty in a first-degree murder case. But this jury has qualified it with life imprisonment.” The jurors were willing to punish the men for killing an American Indian, but they would not hang them for it. The judge told Hale and Ramsey, “Stand before the bench.” Hale rose quickly, Ramsey hesitantly. The judge declared that he was sentencing them to the penitentiary for the “period of your natural lives.” He then asked, “Have you anything to say, Mr. Hale?”

  Hale stared straight ahead, vacantly. “No, sir,” he said.

  “And you, Mr. Ramsey?”

  Ramsey simply shook his head.

  Reporters rushed out of the courtroom to file their stories, proclaiming, as the New York Times put it, “KING OF OSAGE HILLS” GUILTY OF MURDER. The attorney Leahy would hail the outcome as “one of the greatest indications of law and justice that has been realized in the country.” Mollie welcomed the verdict, but, as White knew, there were some things that no successful investigation, no system of justice, could restore.

  A year later, when Anna Brown’s murder was prosecuted, Mollie attended the trial. By then, Morrison had recanted his confession, shifting his allegiance yet again in the hope of securing compensation from Hale. Authorities had seized a note that he had sent to Hale in prison, in which he had promised to “burn” down the authorities “if I ever get the Chance.” Prosecutors gave Bryan Burkhart immunity, believing that it was necessary to obtain Morrison’s conviction. During the trial, Mollie listened again to the gruesome details of how Bryan, her brother-in-law, had gotten her sister drunk and then propped up her body while Morrison shot her in the back of the head—or, as Bryan put it, “watered” her.

  Bryan recalled that a week after the shooting he had returned to the scene of the crime with Mollie and her family to identify Anna’s rotting corpse. The memory had lingered with Mollie, but only now could she fully comprehend the scene: Bryan was standing near her, staring down at his victim while feigning grief.

  “Did you go out to see this body?” an attorney asked Bryan.

  “That is what we all went for,” he said.

  The shocked attorney asked him, “You knew Anna Brown’s dead body was out there, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Morrison had been among the onlookers. Ernest had been there, too, comforting Mollie, even though he had known that Anna’s two killers were standing only a few feet away from them. Similarly, Ernest had known from the moment Rita and Bill Smith’s house exploded who was responsible; he had known the truth when, later that evening, he had crept into bed with Mollie, and he had known the whole time she had been desperately searching for the killers. By the time Morrison was convicted of Anna’s murder, Mollie could no longer look at Ernest. She soon divorced him, and whenever her husband’s name was mentioned, she recoiled in horror.

  For Hoover, the Osage murder investigation became a showcase for the modern bureau. As he had hoped, the case demonstrated to many around the country the need for a national, more professional, scientifically skilled force. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote of the murders, “Sheriffs investigated and did nothing. State’s Attorneys investigated and did nothing. The Attorney General investigated and did nothing. It was only when the Government sent Department of Justice agents into the Osage country that law became a thing of majesty.”

  Hoover was careful not to disclose the bureau’s earlier bungling. He did not reveal that Blackie Thompson had escaped under the bureau’s watch and killed a policeman, or that because of so many false starts in the probe other murders had occurred. Instead, Hoover created a pristine origin story, a founding mythology in which the bureau, under his direction, had emerged from lawlessness and overcome the last wild American frontier. Recognizing that the new modes of public relations could expand his bureaucratic power and instill a cult of personality, Hoover asked White to send him information that he could share with the press: “There is, of course, as you can appreciate, a difference between legal aspects and human interest aspects and what the representatives of the press would have an interest in would be the human interest aspect, so I would like to have you emphasize this angle.”

  Hoover fed the story to sympathetic reporters—so-called friends of the bureau. One article about the case, which was syndicated by William Randolph Hearst’s company, blared,

  NEVER TOLD BEFORE! —

  How the Government with the Most Gigantic Fingerprint System on Earth Fights Crime with Unheard-of Science Refinements; Revealing How Clever Sleuths Ended a
Reign of Murder and Terror in the Lonely Hills of the Osage Indian Country, and Then Rounded Up the Nation’s Most Desperate Gang

  In 1932, the bureau began working with the radio program The Lucky Strike Hour to dramatize its cases. One of the first episodes was based on the murders of the Osage. At Hoover’s request, Agent Burger had even written up fictional scenes, which were shared with the program’s producers. In one of these scenes, Ramsey shows Ernest Burkhart the gun he plans to use to kill Roan, saying, “Look at her, ain’t she a dandy?” The broadcasted radio program concluded, “So another story ends and the moral is identical with that set forth in all the others of this series….[The criminal] was no match for the Federal Agent of Washington in a battle of wits.”

  Though Hoover privately commended White and his men for capturing Hale and his gang and gave the agents a slight pay increase—“a small way at least to recognize their efficiency and application to duty”—he never mentioned them by name as he promoted the case. They did not quite fit the profile of college-educated recruits that became part of Hoover’s mythology. Plus, Hoover never wanted his men to overshadow him.

  The Osage Tribal Council was the only governing body to publicly single out and praise White and his team, including the undercover operatives. In a resolution, which cited each of them by name, the council said, “We express our sincere gratitude for the splendid work done in the matter of investigating and bringing to justice the parties charged.” The Osage, meanwhile, had taken their own steps to protect themselves against future plots, persuading Congress to pass a new law. It barred anyone who was not at least half Osage from inheriting headrights from a member of the tribe.

  Soon after Hale and Ramsey were convicted, White faced a momentous decision. The U.S. assistant attorney general, who oversaw the federal prison system, had asked White if he would take over as warden of Leavenworth prison, in Kansas. The oldest federal penitentiary, it was then considered one of the country’s most dreaded places to be incarcerated. There had been allegations of corruption at the prison, and the assistant attorney general had told Hoover that White was ideal for the job: “I hate to give up the chances of getting a warden that I think will be as good as Mr. White.”

  Hoover did not want White to leave the bureau. He told the assistant attorney general that it would be a tremendous loss. Still, Hoover said, “I feel that I would be unfair to [White] if I should oppose his promotion. I have, as you know, the highest regard for him, personally and officially.”

  After some torment, White decided to leave the bureau. The job offered him greater pay and meant that he would no longer need to uproot his wife and young boys. It also offered him a chance to preside over a prison, just as his father had, although on a far larger scale.

  On November 17, 1926, when White was still settling into the new job, two new inmates were convoyed up the prison’s horseshoe driveway by U.S. marshals. The inmates took in their grim destination: Leavenworth was a 366,000-square-foot fortress, which, as a prisoner once described, rose out of the surrounding cornfields like a “giant mausoleum adrift in a great sea of nothingness.” As the two inmates approached the entryway in shackles, White walked toward them. Their faces were pale from a lack of sunlight, but White recognized them: Hale and Ramsey.

  “Why, hello, Tom,” Hale said to White.

  “Hello, Bill,” White answered.

  Ramsey said to White, “Howdy.”

  White shook hands with both inmates, who were then led away to their cells.

  21   THE HOT HOUSE

  It was like wandering through the catacombs of memory. As White walked along the cell block tiers, he could see figures from his past, their eyes peering out from behind bars, their bodies gleaming with sweat. He saw Hale and Ramsey. He encountered members of the old Al Spencer Gang and the former head of the Veterans Bureau, who had committed bribery during the scandalous Harding administration. And White came upon the two deserters who had killed his older brother, Dudley, though White never mentioned the connection, not wanting to cause them any distress.

  White lived with his family on the prison grounds. His wife was initially unable to sleep, wondering, “How do you raise two young boys in this kind of environment?” The challenges of managing the prison—which was designed to hold twelve hundred inmates but instead had three times that number—were overwhelming. In the summer, the temperatures inside rose as high as 115 degrees, which is why prisoners would later call Leavenworth the Hot House. One August day in 1929, when it was so nightmarishly hot that the milk in the prison’s kitchen soured, a riot erupted in the mess hall. Red Rudensky, an infamous safecracker, recalled that there was “ugly, dangerous, killing hate” and that White rushed in to quell the unrest: “Warden White showed his courage, and came within a few feet of me, although cleavers and broken, jagged bottles were inches from him.”

  White tried to improve conditions in the prison. A custodian who later worked under him recalled, “The Warden was strict with the inmates but would never stand for any mistreatment or heckling of them.” White once sent Rudensky a note that said, “It takes a good deal of nerve to change a course that you have been on for years and years—more so, maybe than I realize, but if it is in you, now is the time to show it.” Because of White’s support, Rudensky recalled, “I had a ray of hope.”

  Though White encouraged efforts at rehabilitation, he had few illusions about many of the men contained in the Hot House. In 1929, Carl Panzram—a repeat killer who’d confessed to slaying twenty-one people and insisted, “I have no conscience”—beat a member of the prison staff to death. He was sentenced to be hanged inside the penitentiary, and White, though opposed to capital punishment, was given the grim task of overseeing the execution, much as his father had done in Texas. On September 5, 1930, as the sun rose over the prison dome, White went to take Panzram from his cell to the newly built gallows. White made sure that his two boys weren’t present when the noose was looped around the neck of Panzram, who shouted at his executioners to hurry up: “I could hang a dozen men while you’re fooling around.” At 6:03 a.m., the trap opened and Panzram swung to his death. It was the first time that White had helped to end a human life.

  After arriving at Leavenworth, William Hale was assigned to duty on the tuberculosis ward. Later, he toiled on the prison farm, where he tended pigs and other animals the way he had during his early days on the frontier. A prison report said, “He does high grade work caring for stock, and is able to do such operations as opening of abscesses and castrating of animals.”

  In November 1926, when a reporter wrote to White fishing for gossip about Hale, White refused to provide any, insisting that Hale would be “treated as other prisoners are treated.” White went out of his way so that Hale’s wife and daughter never felt slighted by prison officials. Hale’s wife once wrote a letter to White, saying, “Would I be imposing to ask your permission to see my husband next Monday? It will be almost three weeks since my last visit and of course I realize your regulations allow us only one visit each month but…if you could please grant me this I would surely appreciate it.” White wrote back that she would be welcome at the prison.

  Over the years, Hale never admitted ordering any of the murders: not the killing of Roan, for which he was convicted, or the countless other murders that the evidence showed he had orchestrated but that he wasn’t prosecuted for after he had received a life sentence. Despite his refusal to admit responsibility, he had given, during trial testimony, a rather cold statement about a different attempt that he’d made to swindle a headright—a statement that seemed to reveal his ethos: “It was a business proposition with me.”

  Whereas White had once turned to preachers to illuminate this thing of darkness, he now also searched for a scientific explanation. In prison, Hale was given a neurological and psychological examination. The evaluator found that Hale showed no obvious “evidence of repression nor of frank psychosis” but nevertheless had “extremely vicious components in his make-up.
” Cloaking his savagery under the banner of civilization, Hale portrayed himself as an American pioneer who had helped forge a nation out of the raw wilderness. The evaluator observed, “His poor judgment is further evidenced by his continued denial of his obvious guilt. His affect is not suitable….He has put behind him any feeling of shame or repentance he may have had.” White read the evaluator’s psychological study of Hale, but there was some evil that seemed beyond the scope of science. Though Hale conformed to prison regulations, he continued to scheme to secure his release. He allegedly arranged for an appeals court to be bribed, and when these efforts failed to win him freedom, he boasted, as the evaluator noted, of “his probable release through influence of friends.”

   Mollie Burkhart Credit 60

  Yet for the first time in ages life in Osage County went on without his overwhelming presence. Mollie Burkhart began again to socialize and attend church. She eventually fell in love with a man named John Cobb, who was part white and part Creek. According to relatives, their love was genuine, and in 1928 they were married.